In today's working environment, professionals often spend a great deal of time away from their desks or out of the office entirely, which makes it difficult to maintain regular contact with colleagues, suppliers and/or customers. Most professionals who are away from the office dial in to a voicemail system in order to retrieve voice mail messages. Dialing in typically involves telephoning a main number and then navigating through a series of menus. The dialing in process is time consuming and must be performed often in order to ensure that important voice mail messages are retrieved in a timely manner.
For voicemail systems that include unified messaging functionalities, voicemail messages can be saved manually to a user's hard drive, converted to a file format that is supported by their mobile device and then uploaded to the mobile device. This process requires audio conversion software, which is often expensive, as well as some level of technical knowledge. Further, the process is inefficient because the time required to upload the messages often exceeds time required to listen to the messages. In addition, although this process allows the user to upload voicemail messages to a mobile device, it does not provide a solution for retrieving voicemail remotely since the user must be present in the office to perform the upload.
It is therefore desirable to provide an improved solution for retrieving voice mail messages remotely and in a timely manner.